Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Steven Heine

Quote by Steven Heine

“On matters of transgression in the social sphere, Zen's deficiencies cannot be blamed on an indifferent or unresponsive attitude, for in some cases it has been actively pursuing a reprehensible agenda. Perhaps part of the problem is Zen's apparent lack of a sense of good versus evil on a metaphysical level in stressing that all phenomena are interconnected and interpenetrating.”

Quote by Steven Heine

Book:Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?
Create image

Work

Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Steven Heine

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Steven Heine. more

You May Also Like

“What happens when it comes to light that in Zen there has always been a large and fundamental role for verbal communication and that, indeed, Zen masters have produced a tremendous volume of writings that originally were based on oral teachings (while the claim for the priority of orality has itself been questioned)? Does this point to a basic contradiction or hypocrisy in Zen, or would the prevalence of literary production mean that our understanding of what constitutes Zen transmission in relation to oral and written discourse must be reconfigured?”

Zen
Book:Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?
Create image

“It is now clear that the kōan about Mahakasyapa's receiving the flower after Sakyamuni's wordless sermon, as well as slogans like "special transmission outside the teaching" and "no reliance on words and letters"—originally separate items that came to be linked in a famous Zen motto attributed to Bodhidharma—were created in the Sung dynasty. First making their appearance in eleventh-century transmissions of the lamp texts, including the Chingte chuan-teng lu (1004) and the T'ien-sheng kuang-teng lu (1036), these rhetorical devices were designed to support the autonomous identity of Zen in an era of competition with neo-Confucianism and are not to be regarded as accurate expressions of the period they are said to represent. A close examination of sources reveals that Tang masters with a reputation for irreverence and blasphemy were often quite conservative in their approach to doctrine by citing (rather than rejecting) Mahayana sutras in support of teachings that were not so distinct from, and were actually very much in accord with, contemporary Buddhist schools.”

Zen
Book:Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?
Create image

“For TZN, nonsense in Zen is understood in the most positive of terms on a metaphysical level rising above and standing beyond the contrast and conflict between sense and senselessness. Nonsense is a tool skillfully used to help put an end to seeking a path of reason and to point to an enlightened state unbound by the polarity of logic or illogic. For the dissolution thesis, on the other hand, the endless wordplay in Zen literature represents an infantile stammering and the willful abandonment of meaning, and is a kind of verbal cunning and trickery that harbors risky ethical (i.e., antinomian) consequences. Here we find clearly the roots of the critique of Zen's failure to negotiate human rights issues, which seems to rest on a tendency toward deceptive, duplicitous rhetoric that avoids being pinned down or committed to any particular view or decision.”

Zen
Book:Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?
Create image

“Zen discourse ranges from rejection to veneration with exorcistic trends never disappearing, and the haughty disdain for supernaturalism in some records coexists with full-scale syncretism that includes purification rites. This range in the levels of discourse of Japanese amalgamations offers many striking contrasts with the nonassimilative, intolerant interactions between Christianity and medieval European paganism.”

Zen
Book:White Collar Zen: Using Zen Principles to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Your Career Goals
Create image

“When acknowledged, problems regarding Zen rights are seen by TZN as skin, flesh, and bones relative to a record of outstanding accomplishment in addressing the greater needs of humankind and the potential that Zen has at its core, or marrow, to achieve much more in the social realm than other less philosophically consistent spiritual outlooks or less disciplined forms of religious training. To put it crudely, according to TZN, Zen and only Zen, which functions seamlessly in both the ideal and real realms, is capable of embarking on a worldwide mission to save modern civilization from its own undoing. But according to HCC, the Zen approach, in which there festers an irresolvable gap between realms, has already shown its failure to address some basic matters of inequity within the narrow context of Japanese society and should not be let off the hook.”

Zen
Book:Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?
Create image